FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Despite the shirt coming almost to my knees, the nurse seemed incapable of holding me so that the thick white padding on my rump wasn't visible to every passerby in the halls. A chorus of cooing noises and awwws followed me as we passed a few gaily decorated rooms filled with families here to see their loved ones into or out of the rejuvenation vats. It was hard to blame them of course, I'd had the same reaction at seeing me.

We stepped into the elevator where a little girl was waiting with her mother, holding a brand new teddy bear and a balloon that read "Welcome Back Grandpa". She oooed up at me and pointed "mommy i want one of those!" , drawing a chuckle from the nurse and mother both. "Can I pet her?" she asked as her hand was already in motion, reaching up for my dangling tail.

As I often had to around human children I opened my mouth to tell her I didn't like being touched and.....a warm, tingling sensation ran up my tail to my spine and I felt myself relaxing, a little murrr escaping my mouth in place of my protest. The tail twitched a little back and forth lazily, across her cheeks making her giggle as she tried to catch it. Her mother whispered a sorry, and got off on the second floor.

"I don..i..m.not.butshe.But I....

.

It just dawned on me that for the past day I'd been picked up, poked, prodded, bathed, brushed, dressed and carried and it didn't feel bad. Some of it actually felt good. Too good. The nurse put a finger up to my lips and shushed me "Aaalright, aalright, shhhush Its ok, its alright..." she started walking quickly down the hall to a big wooden door at the end, opening it quickly with one hand while holding me with the other. She didn't even get the door closed before I screamed out "WHADID YOU DO TO MY ......My brain!?"

Six holo emitters held on skeletal frames shot to life, including the one directly in front of me displaying what I recognized from previous scans was me. The real me.

A fuzzy image of a brain turned slowly in the air, blue lights of interconnected neural networks flickering in the dance of electrochemical potential that inexplicably gave rise to what made a person them. Thoughts, hopes, dreams, desires, personality, all came from a 2 and a half pound bundle of semi random mush that didn't even generate enough volts to power the emitter that was displaying its picture. The miracle of life, thought, and consciousness given form in fog and light. Seven other brains turned in sync with the first, each one slightly different than its neighbors but signifigantly different from the ones further away from it.

"Ronan, meet Ronan.

Sitting on the floor in the middle of makeshift frames propped up on a stool, the couch, and a coffee table in his oversized lab coat was Dr. Bernard. He twisted a whirling multi tool one last time. The emitters sparked, once, twice, three times and went out. He hmmmed, rubbed his chin and thwapped it with the end of the tool and the images popped back to life and coalesced into crystal clear sharpness. "There we go.

A child playing with power tools was allowed to re write my brain. To re write me. Who I was, what I was.

The rumble growling in my throat must have been audible to the tiny doctor. "Not an unusual reaction but ahh.. this is the first time the patients been mobile and had teeth for this conversation so Nurse if you would...." I felt the nurse secure her grip on me around my stomach as she stepped gingerly over and through the makeshift displays to sit me on her lap while she sat on the couch, well out of leaping range of the regressed physician.

"Ahem" a throat clearing from behind the desk was more than enough to make me jump a little. I wasn't used to not realizing someone was in the room. Through one of the semi transparent brains I could see Dr. Ockerman sitting behind a desk reclined back in a very comfortable looking chair, hands folded on his stomach with one eye open. "My "senior" colleague went through a lot of trouble to put together this demonstration, and even more trouble to put you together. It would behoove you to listen" his voice was low, flat and deep.

I only wriggled on the nurse's lap to get comfortable. I was not trying to hide behind her, despite her coming to my defense "Oh shush you. She's been an angel all morning" she turned to Dr Bernard . "Someone touched her tail in the elevator and I think she noticed that thing you said look out for?"

The pediatric pediatrician stood up, dusted himself off and point to one of the brains "If I could start at the beginning?" I shook my head no, tail in full bottle brush mode. II wanted to know now dammit. "Can I have till you finish eating this?" And took out a packet that smelled strongly of salami, setting my mouth drooling. I sniffed at it suspiciously and he took a bite from the bottom. "See? Perfectly safe. And yes its synth"

My stomach grumbled again, and I wondered how long I'd been in that bath and nodded. I tore into it quickly while he used a laser pointer to point out two of the brains. "This is a "typical" male brain and a "typical" female brain, as an average composite of over 100,000 scans in a stratified sample...." i took an especially big bite to emphasize how little time before... well I wasn't going to bite him. Scream at him loudly or something. Maybe a nibble.

"Ahem.. anyway..." he took a laser pointer out of his labcoat In the back you'll see a typical male human brain , a typical female human brain. Here we have a male Vulpes and a female Vulpes brain. While taken with a much smaller sample size you can see that they're much closer in conformation, your particular breed even more so. A few aspects of sexual dimorphism from your human DNA were retained. Note the females slightly increased gray matter and corpus callosum? They increase overall brain efficiency and interconnectivity. This is the brain working on a complex problem, note how the whole brain comes into play." interlaced webs of blue light shot all over the brain in a complicated tapestry of thought. "The male brain on the other hand focuses more on one part of the brain" a spot on the left side lit up like a spot light, with nothing but a few lonely flickers here and there for the other parts.

You were born here but your parents are from off world yes?

I nodded, and used my paw to make hopping motions. My parents liked to planet hop, and their services were in enough demand to have universities, companies, and even private patrons pay the exorbitant fees to ship them world to world. They could even afford to be a package deal, despite their disparate disciplines. Dad often joked that all mom needed for her research into mathematics was a scribe,paper and a trash can. Usually right before mom swatted him. The nurses grip around me turned into a hug.

"Well, that's one of the reasons I was able to get approval for my...little experiment" I glared at him. I felt like growling, but just didn't seem to have the energy. I didn't know if i was just tired or if they'd put something in the meat "No no no.. you promised to hear me out remember. You still have half of that left. Uhm.." he took some note cards out of his apparently bottomless pockets " where was I. parents.."

Dr. Occerman came half awake again. "The different forms of regressive brain restructuring. AKA, the butchers down the hall."

"Oh right. This... if your brain..." Dr Bernard pointed to the middle image. "Thiiis, is your brain on regressive restructuring. " the middle brain shrank down, down down... "If you're planning your rejuvenation" He looked over to Dr Occerman " You have to balance how many extra years you get with the possibility of having your brain altered. You can regress down to 12 without losing a any of mass, but then you're not getting back all the years you could. If you go down further to do a XY chromosome substitution therapy, or repair brain damage...

"Say if you gave yourself a heart attack jogging through the woods, didn't tell anyone where you were going and were clinically dead for 4 hours before anyone froze you..." I could hear the smile in his voice, but his face retained the calm, peaceful mask of one having a pleasant nap.

"Hey! Dr Patient Confidentiality " he threw a morsel of leftover sausage at his colleague.

"I was speaking hypothetically..."

"If you trust your Doctor on the other hand you can go down as far as three without hitting anything I can't compensate for in the long run" the child on the floor said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and thus turning his icy glare into a rather cute pout "there are a large number of tricks you can do to preserve the important stuff. Memories aren't stored in any one place on your brain. They're interconnected. So losing a few neurons here and there is no big deal, your brain will patch in the missing parts. It's a natural process. Your brain does most of the work there, It's used to it from doing it all the time with real memories, and your visual blind spot.

"I think he just wants to be taller than me for once..."

Despite how filling the salami was, i was starting to get towards the end. I flicked my tongue out a little and made a drinking motion with my hand. Nurse whispered into my ear "Would you like a bottle?" I looked at the two doctors, particularly Dr Ockerman and shook my head no. He rummaged through the desk for a few seconds and came out with juice in a pouch which he threw to the nurse. She placed my paws away from it and insisted on inserting the built in straw herself and helping me hold it. I drank quickly, and looked pointedly at the few remaining bites of lunch.

"Right.. so... while you're shrinking that brain down you have a chance to shape it a little. When doing an XY substitution like yours you can't let the brain reshape the brain into an entirely female one without taking it down to prenatal levels. There's a few schools of thought on how to compensate for that. On the right we have an older way of doing that, which is to conform the brain to an ideal standard of femininity. This had.. well,has a very high rate of producing what the corrections department likes to call "successful" transitions, but you lose a fair bit of the original personality and and memories.

I shuddered a little at that. Miss lilly slowly started stroking my tail and i felt a warm peace slowly start to fill through me, from my stomach, down my limbs, making me slump back against her with all the rigidity of a teddy bear. It looked.. grown. Processed. Artificial. I wonder if that was because it did or just because they'd told me it was.

"In the middle we have a slightly more modern way of doing it. . Keeps more of the personality, but doesn't always result in what the department would prefer as a proper young lady... mostly because many young ladies aren't proper, especially if they' didn't chose to become so, and a lifetime of learned habbits as a boy don't help either. You make the individual into them as a girl rather than some platonic standard of girl. You compare where their brain structures are on several criteria, compare it to the male average, so if you have a slightly large corpus callosum for a male you set it to grow into a slightly large one for a female. Its.. actually much more complicated than that, but you're dozing off on me already

I shook my head, and realized that the last piece of food was gone, save for a bit on my muzzle, which i quickly corrected with a few licks. I wriggled a bit against the nurse to get comfortable and half listened to the grown ups babbling at each other.

"There's also the school of thought" Dr Ockerman apparently thought this was important enough to sit up for " that most of the brain differentiation occurs after puberty. So as long as you've changed the genetics and give the brain a few years of lead time the brain is best left alone.

"Yes, but I'm three hundred and seventeen and a half and even I think that's old fashioned. Next you'll be joining the blank slate crowd.

Miss Lily interrupted the pair "Boys.. the patient?

"Ahh yes yes.. The patient. Here she is. Ronan, I give you.. Rona" and taped the last two displays closest to me. Putting my paw out to touch one sent my fur raising on end. I knew that the projection was just a picture, but I couldn't suppress the goosebumps raising my hackles. " Right next to it is a brain scan as you were." My lip quivered a bit as i looked at what was lost. The light one side shone like the sun, with only bare, faint pulses here and there in other areas. I looked at the other one to see what had been done to me, made of me and...my jaw dropped

"Don't see any differences huh? " I shook my head despite it being not quite true. The new brain.. my new brain had the light a little more diffuse and spread out. " As you can see, I changed as little as I could get away with. The only brain scan we had available for one of your breed was one from your mother, and that's not nearly enough to form a template off of, which made a good excuse for being very conservative with the alterations. May I join you on my couch?" .

I nodded, trying to keep myself from passing out in relief, and felt him climb up next to me and lean over to point out some of the features on...well. Me. It didn't look to bad.

"Ok, first the changes everyone gets. We didn't shrink your skull QUITE as much as the rest of you, so we were able to keep you mostly in tact. Your synaptic pruning got undone. The downside is that this makes you very very impressionable, like other small children. Any trauma you pick up now might stay with you for a cycle... or longer. On the plus side, if you ever wanted to pick up another language this is the perfect time.

The prefrontal cortex gets regressed in almost every time That controls and regulates emotions and emotional responses and as you can see it's rather reduced at the moment. Like your muscles you've never actually used this one, so you're largely at the mercy of your instincts."

"It's half the reason I'm here." Dr Ockerman took a model ship off the top shelf and started dusting it with his sleeve" Even after being back for 8 years Wonder Tot here isn't allowed to do anything that remotely counts as doctoring without supervision because he might go off and do something without considering the ramifications. Say something like like "borrowing" three emitters from dermatology. If I didn't know he was like this before the process I swear I'd bench him....

.Dr. Bernard paid him no mind "You had what would have been described back in my day as a very male brain. Maybe a little too much so to be honest". I flattened my ears a bit at him "Oh, there's nothing wrong with it if it worked for you. But you can't deny that you felt like you may not have been feeling quite the same things as the people around you? A closeness, a connection other people seemed to have that you were missing? Missing out on the ups and downs, trials and tribulations that seemed to motivate the people around you? Trouble telling what others were feeling, maybe even what you were feeling? Like there were more to emotions that vague feelings in the pit of your stomach?"

I slowly retrieved my tail from where Miss Lilly had been petting it and shook it at him.

"Most kin I know are quite the opposite if anything. Were your parents like that?"

I huffed and shook my head.

" Once you mature you should wind up about halfway between where you were and how your mother's brain works, and there's certainly nothing wrong with how your mother's brain works, but it IS going to feel a little.. different." he pointed. "You've had a lot more going on up here than you felt. I don't think suppressing your feelings like you have been is good for anyone. Just burying everything worked...kind of, for a male brain. With the increased connectivity you're going to have to sort through your feelings up here." he put his small hand up on my head between my ears. I smiled and leaned against his hand, enjoying the slightly bouncy feeling of the thick mass of fur atop my head " That is.. very soft. You have to try this. I don't know how much you remember but we did work on this a little. Talking, showing you a few different ways to concentrate..."

"And here I must interject that the good Doctor is crossing from established medical practice into carnival tricks and ancient voodoo superstition, even for the lax standards of his chosen discipline."

Tsking, Nurse lilly took the boys hand off my head and tapped him on the wrist "You have to ask before you touch" , the warm , wonderfully fuzzy feeling died down I glared at the little Dr right next to me, but the only motion I could really make was to swish my tail back and forth stiffly

"Sorry. It's just so fluffy...ahem. You probably want to know why that feels different." he rubbed his wrist with a hurt look on his face and took a pocket watch out of his pocket, swayed it back and forth lightly on the end of a chain. It had a cold metallic scent under... popcorn butter? My eyes went wide "in mydream datwasyou ina" came out before it devolved into yips.

He smiled and nodded "I thought you'd be one of the ones that remembers some of that. Yes, that was me. All it was was talking really, helping you focus and concentrate. No rewriting your brain. Just talking, focusing, and relaxing. Listening quietly calmly. Whatever happened last time so that you got spooked whenever someone touched you got undone with your neural pruning. We wanted to make sure you didn't slide back. Funny how the brain works though, you remembered having to tell people that without remembering it. Shhhh.. nothing to worry about now. Just relaaaaax..."

He put his hand out near him, well out of reach. My tail started to wag floppily behind me. I remembered the warm, soft touch on my ears. The calm feeling of being connected with another person, the warmth spreading throughout me. A whimper welled up in my throat and I leaned forward, falling onto the couch in between the two humans with my chin on the doctors knee and my tail flopping against miss Lilly. Dr Bernard smiled up at the nurse. "That counts as permission?" and started stroking along my ears. I breathed out a happy sigh of relief I hadn't realized I'd been holding and let myself relax completely under his hand. "See? Nooothing to worry about. Niiiiice and relaxed. You're still you sweetie....breathe iiiiiin. And out. Iiiin and out..." His hand stroked down my neck, over my back tracing a sinuous line over my shirt and down to my tail. I closed my eyes and felt something warm trickling between my legs and under my tail.

"Goood girl"

I heard Dr Ockerman come around to the side and set something on the table with a soft clink. "If you make her boc like a chicken I am reporting you.

"I only tried that once, with you. And it hasn't worked. Yet. Shhh..See how well it works? How relaxed she is?

The now cleaned ship in a bottle read "Theseus" on the side. Why did i have a feeling that was going to be on the test tomorrow.... my eyes were so heavy I couldn't hold them up.

"Of course she's relaxed. There was enough sedative in that salami to drop a fullback. How'd you make it look like you were eating it yourself anyway?

"I ywaawwwn....only had a little..." and felt him slump down besides me. At least one of us was already snoring.